Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Saturday, December 5, 2015

The Ecology of Law

"Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei argue that at the root of
many of the environmental, economic, and social crises we face today is a
legal system based on an obsolete worldview. Capra, a bestselling
author, physicist, and systems theorist, and Mattei, a distinguished
legal scholar, explain how, by incorporating concepts from modern
science, the law can become an integral part of bringing about a better
world, rather than facilitating its destruction. "This is the
first book to trace the fascinating parallel history of law and science
from antiquity to modern times, showing how the two disciplines have
always influenced each other—until recently. In the past few decades,
science has shifted from seeing the natural world as a kind of cosmic
machine best understood by analyzing each cog and sprocket to a systems
perspective that views the world as a vast network of fluid communities
and studies their dynamic interactions. The concept of ecology
exemplifies this approach. But law is stuck in the old mechanistic
paradigm: the world is simply a collection of discrete parts, and
ownership of these parts is an individual right, protected by the state.
Capra and Mattei show that this has led to overconsumption, pollution,
and a general disregard on the part of the powerful for the common good.

"Capra and Mattei outline the basic concepts and structures of a
legal order consistent with the ecological principles that sustain life
on this planet. This is a profound and visionary reconceptualization of
the very foundations of the Western legal system, a kind of Copernican
revolution in the law, with profound implications for the future of our
planet."